Source: CNN News
If you can’t remember where your car keys are, you may want to eat fewer muffins.
It turns out the more trans fat you eat, the less you may remember, according to a study presented at the American Heart Association’s scientific conference last week. Maybe that explains why some people don’t know how they pack on the pounds over the holidays.
To look at what role trans fat played in memory, scientists in this new study looked at the diets of about 1,000 working-age healthy men.
The participants were shown 104 cards with words on them. With each new card the adult was shown, he was asked whether the word was new or had been repeated.
Examining their blood, scientists discovered that a disproportionate number of people who had a lot of trans fat in their system remembered fewer words than those with less in their system.
For each extra gram of trans fat eaten a day, the person in the study remembered .76 fewer words. The men who ate the most trans fat in the study remembered a total of about 10% fewer words compared with the adults who ate the least amount of trans fat, even when filtered for demographic qualities that typically affect one’s memory like age, depression and education.
This is not the first study to show a link between memory problems and high-fat diets, but it is one of the first to look at this large a group of younger adult men. A 2012 study of older women found those who consumed more fat of all types had memory challenges. A 2013 study in the UK found similar results in a small number of young women.
Categories: Health